Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes

Earlier this year, I wrote a column about the publishing industry’s resistance to the terms Apple was imposing for subscriptions on the iPad. Soon after, an e-mail was followed by a phone call and Steve Jobs was on the line to straighten me out.

At the time, publishers were profoundly unhappy. Apple was not only proposing to take a third of the revenues, but it was also requiring that the transaction go through Apple, meaning publishers would get none of the consumer data that had such high value to advertisers.

Mr. Jobs was friendly enough — I can recall a less pleasant conversation about the criminal case involving a stolen iPhone prototype — but he thought it was silly for publishers to whine about sales without data. After all, he said, they already did a tremendous business on the physical newsstand that did not provide a lick of data about their buyers.

Our exchange was more an example of Mr. Jobs as micromanager than as technological visionary. But the perspective it showed is indicative of a pattern for Apple and Mr. Jobs. Again and again, he would step up to entrenched players in the media with calcified business models and explain their business to them in ways they did not recognize from the inside.

Apple is a technology company, but as someone who writes about the insular kingdom of media, I can’t think of a bigger player on the board in the last 10 years. In music, in movies and in publishing, Apple has upended long-standing paradigms and altered the media landscape. (Television has been another story, so far, though there are rumors that the company is turning its guns on TV in a big way.)

So what secret tunnel did he use to bypass and overcome traditional media businesses? One carved by consumers. By placing sexy, irresistible devices in the hands of the public, he reverse-engineered the business model of the industries that produce the content for Apple’s gorgeous hardware.

When the iPod and iTunes were unveiled in 2001, the music industry was under siege from piracy, with services like Napster thriving on the free use of its content. Mr. Jobs’s take-it-or-leave-it deal gave Apple control over pricing, data, distribution and platform, a proposal of towering hubris. But the industry, kicking and screaming all the way, eventually went along, and 10 billion song downloads later, digital revenue is a fundamental part of the business.

In the process, Apple brought a practical end to the album format — allowing people to buy individual songs and create their own playlists.

ITunes not only supplied a legitimate, easy-to-use alternative to piracy, it created a runway for services like Pandora and Spotify.

“He took a locked system, one that was controlled by the record companies, and cracked it open,” said Jim Guerinot, the longtime manager of the Offspring, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, and Gwen Stefani. “That disruption created opportunities for everything that has happened since.”

Mr. Jobs did not so much see around corners; he saw things in plain sight that others did not. “It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want,” he explained.

In the case of music, many of us wanted the ease and portability of MP3 files, but didn’t want to become mouse-enabled criminals taking the music we wanted. From that perspective, 99 cents seemed like a small price to pay.

“I think far from destroying the music business, he put it on a path to redemption,” said Tom Freston, former head of Viacom and MTV. “With the iPod and iTunes, Steve not only created his own ecosystem, it turned out to be one that was contagious and created opportunities not only for his computer business, but for all the Apple products that came behind it.”

Mr. Jobs was initially pegged as a technologist who did not understand the media and entertainment businesses, but his track record as an operator is pretty enviable. In 1986, he bought the company that would become Pixar from George Lucas for $5 million and invested $5 million more.

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Mr. Jobs understood that all that technological processing power could be used in service of narrative in unforeseen ways. After two decades and many computer-generated blockbusters, he sold the company to Disney in a deal valued at $7.4 billion.

Mr. Jobs has walked quickly and surely past conventional wisdom. He had no interest in market research. He did things his own way and expected the rest of the world to fall into line. He both brought the mouse into our homes and more or less killed it off, eliminated the floppy disk with the first iMac, and did away with the DVD on the MacBook Air, decisions that foretold the obsolescence of physical media. He shrank Web-enabled devices by piggybacking on the phone business, profoundly changing the way in which people consume media.

“Before the iPhone, cyberspace was something you went to your desk to visit,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and longtime Apple watcher. “Now cyberspace is something you carry in your pocket.”

Mr. Saffo compared Mr. Jobs to a latter-day Marshall McLuhan, one for whom the media device became the message.

“He used aesthetics and intuition to create objects of desire,” he said, adding that Mr. Jobs saw technological innovation as more than just advances in hardware.

“Steve was the first one to figure out it could produce profound new media experiences,” he said.

I also think that the force field around Mr. Jobs created a kind of productive fear both inside and outside the company. Those who worked at Apple worried themselves into excellence at the thought of disappointing him and, because he was right so many times, people in the larger media and tech world scrambled to keep up.

The publishing industry came around slowly, but it came around. Many of the major players sat with arms crossed when the iPad was introduced, reasoning that he would eventually understand that he could not dictate terms.

As it turned out, he could, and now Condé Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst are all playing nice with the iPad. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are also agreeable. Apple’s ability to come up with magical devices was only part of it — the iTunes and App stores may be his most remarkable creations. While publishers have struggled to create a mechanism that separates consumers from their cash, Apple has about 200 million credit cards on file and an online environment where people can buy with the push of a button. That database of consumers means that the road to getting paid for media content runs through Apple.

“It has become almost a kind of protection racket,” said Clay Shirky, a digital writer who works in the journalism department at New York University. “His message to traditional media was that he was going to destroy their old business model, but leave some of the income streams intact. It was never going to be as good as it was, but at least they would survive.”

He added: “Being ‘saved’ by Steve Jobs is no picnic because the vigorish is so costly.”

In truth, Mr. Jobs’s effect on the media landscape has been less pernicious than opportunistic. He did not set out to destroy existing business models, he just noticed their lack of relevance and came up with new ones that kept consumers happy and Apple fat.

Along the way, he changed the vocabulary of media. Songs became files, subscriptions became apps — and media became just one more way to make that thing in your hands appear all the more magical.

Correction: August 27, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the inventor of the computer mouse. It was invented by Douglas Engelbart, not Steve Jobs.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

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A version of this article appears in print on August 29, 2011, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Jobs Saw What Others Missed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe